Want To Master A Skill In 2016? Here Are 6 Websites To Use

The stepping stone from where you are today to where you want to be is simple: learning more skills. If we compare the differences between the people living an average lifestyle and successful, happier people, is that the latter have learned and leveraged more valuable skills in their lives.

Whether it’s learning how to invest your money, starting a business, or learning a language, the skills we learn not only makes us more valuable in the marketplace, but they give us the momentum to learn even more skills.

In 2016, let’s commit ourselves to learn at least one new valuable skill to take our careers, businesses, and lives to the next level.

CreativeLIVE brings a unique business model, as they provide free live classes that anyone can tune into. Then, for those who are interested in keeping the course, they can purchase it.

Unlike SkillShare, CreativeLIVE focuses on solely bringing on top experts to share their knowledge. These include New York Times Best Selling Authors such as Tim Ferriss, Pulitzer Prize winners, and more. Their topics are also heavily focused on creative topics like photography, design, and branding.

Skillshare is a learning community where you can learn anything from anyone. While they have classes from experts such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Gary Vaynerchuk, the majority of the courses are from local experts who have useful knowledge to share. Learn everything from branding, SEO, audience building, and more from anyone.

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They have a free community you can join and their premium plans start from $10/month.

As globalization rises, everything from business, media, and the economy will require interaction with foreign people outside of your language.

Learning how to speak a new language will give you a significant advantage over those who lack the knowledge, and it’s better to get started sooner than later. As a side benefit, language learning has been shown by numerous sources to increase your mental agility, memory retention, and decision-making skills.

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Where to learn: You can get started with a free mobile app like Duolingo, or learn faster by using a personalized language learning website like Rype, which matches you with a native speaking teacher for private lessons online.

Codeacademy is a fun, simple, and gamified method of learning how to code, from HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and beyond. You can get started for free, and they will walk you through step-by-step to learn the basics of coding, while forcing you to practice on your own!

Warren Buffet has often claimed that the most valuable skill a recent graduate can learn is the art of public speaking.

Being a good communicator is massively understated and a crucial skill that can never be improved enough. Whether you’re going into a job interview, making a presentation, or starting a business, being a great speaker is what will make you stand out from the crowd and get your message across.

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Check out a local Toastmasters organization in your city and you can start to receive immediate feedback.

Enjoy an abundance of detailed lessons on money management and investing. You can even set up a simulator stock portfolio on Investopedia, where you’ll get $100,000 of “fake” money to get some real-life practice before you start investing with your own hard-earned money.

Which of these websites will you use to learn a skill in 2016? Do you have any other helpful suggestions to share?

7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Goals and Habits Effectively

Now that 2011 is well underway and most people have fallen off the bandwagon when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions (myself included), it’s a good time to step back and take an honest look at our habits and the goals that we want to achieve.

Something that I have learned over the past few years is that if you track something, be it your eating habits, exercise, writing time, work time, etc. you become aware of the reality of the situation. This is why most diet gurus tell you to track what you eat for a week so you have an awareness of the of how you really eat before you start your diet and exercise regimen.

Tracking daily habits and progress towards goals is another way to see reality and create a way for you clearly review what you have accomplished over a set period of time. Tracking helps motivate you too; if I can make a change in my life and do it once a day for a period of time it makes me more apt to keep doing it.

So, if you have some goals and habits in mind that need tracked, all you need is a tracking tool. Today we’ll look at 7 different tools to help you keep track of your habits and goals.

Joe’s Goals

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Joe’s Goals is a web-based tool that allows users to track their habits and goals in an easy to use interface. Users can add as many goals/habits as they want and also check multiple times per day for those “extra productive days”. Something that is unique about Joe’s Goals is the way that you can keep track of negative habits such as eating out, smoking, etc. This can help you visualize the good things that you are doing as well as the negative things that you are doing in your life.

Joe’s Goals is free with a subscription version giving you no ads and the “latest version” for $12 a year.

Daytum

is an in depth way of counting things that you do during the day and then presenting them to you in many different reports and groups. With Daytum you can add several different items to different custom categories such as work, school, home, etc. to keep track of your habits in each focus area of your life.

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Daytum is extremely in depth and there are a ton of settings for users to tweak. There is a free version that is pretty standard, but if you want more features and unlimited items and categories you’ll need Daytum Plus which is $4 a month.

Excel or Numbers

If you are the spreadsheet number cruncher type and the thought of using someone else’s idea of how you should track your habits turns you off, then creating your own Excel/Numbers/Google spreadsheet is the way to go. Not only do you have pretty much limitless ways to view, enter, and manipulate your goal and habit data, but you have complete control over your stuff and can make it private.

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What’s nice about spreadsheets is you can create reports and can customize your views in any way you see fit. Also, by using Dropbox, you can keep your tracker sheets anywhere you have a connection.

Evernote

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I must admit, I am an Evernote junky, mostly because this tool is so ubiquitous. There are several ways you can implement habit/goal tracking with Evernote. You won’t be able to get nifty reports and graphs and such, but you will be able to access your goal tracking anywhere your are, be it iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, or web. With Evernote you pretty much have no excuse for not entering your daily habit and goal information as it is available anywhere.

Evernote is free with a premium version available.

Access or Bento

If you like the idea of creating your own tracker via Excel or Numbers, you may be compelled to get even more creative with database tools like Access for Windows or Bento for Mac. These tools allow you to set up relational databases and even give you the option of setting up custom interfaces to interact with your data. Access is pretty powerful for personal database applications, and using it with other MS products, you can come up with some pretty awesome, in depth analysis and tracking of your habits and goals.

Bento is extremely powerful and user friendly. Also with Bento you can get the iPhone and iPad app to keep your data anywhere you go.

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You can check out Access and the Office Suite here and Bento here.

Analog Bonus: Pen and Paper

All these digital tools are pretty nifty and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but there are some people out there that still swear by a notebook and pen. Just like using spreadsheets or personal databases, pen and paper gives you ultimate freedom and control when it comes to your set up. It also doesn’t lock you into anyone else’s idea of just how you should track your habits.

Conclusion

I can’t necessarily recommend which tool is the best for tracking your personal habits and goals, as all of them have their quirks. What I can do however (yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out) is tell you that the tool to use is whatever works best for you. I personally keep track of my daily habits and personal goals with a combo Evernote for input and then a Google spreadsheet for long-term tracking.

What this all comes down to is not how or what tool you use, but finding what you are comfortable with and then getting busy with creating lasting habits and accomplishing short- and long-term goals.